Welcome to The Great Listen 2020! This course includes everything you need to bring StoryCorps into your classroom and be part of this year’s Great Thanksgiving Listen. Click any of the lessons below to get right to the resources.
- Part One: Full Lesson Plan
- Part Two: Downloadable Toolkit and Handouts
- Part Three: Media Library
- Part Four: Parental Consent & Privacy
- Part Five: Common Core Standards & Alignment
By participating in this project, your students will learn about the importance of storytelling and use StoryCorps to record an interview with an elder or another member of their family or community.
Storytelling and the gift of listening are critical skills for young people. This project offers the opportunity for young people to honor someone in their lives with an interview. They can spend 40 minutes with a grandparent, a sibling, a mentor, or a friend, asking important questions, and listening carefully to their answers.
We invite you to adapt these resources in whatever way best suits the needs of your students. These resources are open to teachers and parents and we’ve included adaptations for online classrooms. In the course content below, you will find downloadable tools and resources, including:
- A lesson plan, complete with student worksheets
- Permission slips
- Suggested StoryCorps stories for listening and viewing
- Tips on how to conduct an interview
- Great questions to ask
- More ways to use StoryCorps in your classroom beyond an interview
- Fast facts about StoryCorps’ privacy policy
- A media library of StoryCorps videos to use in your classroom
- Tools to help your students prepare for their interviews
Looking for more educational resources? Our StoryCorps DIY: Education course includes additional tools and lesson plans for your classroom.
If you have any general feedback or stories of success, please reach out to us at contactus@storycorps.org. We would love to hear from you.